The Hour Of The Star 100th Anniversary Edition 2020 Based On New Transl 2011 2020 Based On New Transl 2011 Clarice Lispector by Clarice Lispector, Cólm Tóibin (intro.), Paulo Gurgel Valente (postface), Benjamin Moser (translation) 9780811230995, 0811230996 instant download after payment.

"The Hour of the Star", Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, & haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio & eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, & her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, & unloved.

Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, & yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn’t seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, & the art of fiction.

In her last book - first published 1977 - she takes readers close to the true mystery of life & leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed!

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Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, & Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father & two sisters, & she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, & the United States, until they separated & she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in…